


Winding Roads Leading Home

by Herwhereabouts



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post Episode 10.22
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24207091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Herwhereabouts/pseuds/Herwhereabouts
Summary: Steve leaves to find peace.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 16
Kudos: 75





	Winding Roads Leading Home

**Author's Note:**

> So, I have never written for this fandom but I couldn't help it, after seeing the last episode. 
> 
> Just trying to wrap my head around things! Might write a chapter 2 if the muse sticks around. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!

Steve calls Danny for the first time close to midnight 2 weeks after he leaves home. They’ve been texting mostly steadily since their goodbye. 

Steve’s in Alaska for the time being. 

Danny picks up after the third ring, sounding somewhat groggy but otherwise alert.

“Hey, how’re you doing, D? How’re you healing up?” Steve asks, voice a little careful, a little hopeful. 

Danny snorts inelegantly into the phone and says, “Steve, hey. Hi to you too. I’m doing about as well as can be expected, you know, under present circumstances.” 

“What does that mean?” Steve asks a little too abruptly, stiffly, like he’s bracing himself for something he won’t like hearing. 

“It means, Steve, that I’ve gotten way too fucking old to heal from shit like this the way I used to. I feel like an old man, buddy, and it ain’t a nice feeling,” Danny admits, voice low. 

It’s a goddamn miracle that he’s even alive, but Steve won’t get into that. He’ll take a slow healing anyday. 

Steve makes a sympathetic pained noise and says, “That sucks, Danny. I’m really sorry I’m not there to help out.” 

Danny scoffs, “What would you be helping me with, exactly? Increasing my blood pressure? This thing, this thing takes time and patience. Grace keeps telling me I’ve gotta take it a day at a time and look towards a better future. And she’s right, my baby is smarter than her old man.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Steve murmurs into the phone, as he settles more into his pillow. 

A beat later, Danny asks him, “So how’re you holding up? How’re things with Cath? I know we’ve been keeping touch through text, but that’s just not the same, is it.” 

It isn’t the same at all. Especially since Steve hasn’t been entirely honest with him. “I’m okay, I guess,” Steve tries saying with more confidence than he feels. And falls spectacularly short of it. 

Danny chuckles. “Right, babe. You’re a hot mess, is what you are. So how about the truth?” 

All Steve will ever owe Danny is the truth, so he exhales a slow breath and admits, “So I maybe kind of officially and finally broke it off with Cath yesterday before she had to catch her flight. I’m also maybe not fully equipped to deal with all the shit inside my head by myself and contacted the VA shrink that she gave me the info for - who comes highly recommended, apparently - to start phone and Skype sessions with so that I can get a handle on things sooner rather than later. And, uh,” he trails off. 

“Fuck, Steve.”

Steve clears his throat and continues, since he can’t seem to fucking stop now. “I, uh, I’m figuring some shit out that I’ve put on hold for a long, long while, you know this, and it’s admittedly pretty terrifying. I’m flying blind, Danny, and…” His voice seizes up and he has to shut his eyes tight against the tears that threaten to fall, because he’s tired of falling apart. It’s fucking exhausting. 

He drank himself into a stupor yesterday and it’s painful being in his own body right now, in his own head. 

Danny hums into the phone, or he’s cooing, Steve can’t really tell since he’s spiraling. Danny’s saying, “Steve, hey Steve, breathe for me, babe, can you do that? Inhale on the count of three, hold it for the count of three, and release it on the count of three.” Steve does just that, and if he had the energy, he’d be embarrassed, totally mortified at his behavior, but he can’t and he doesn’t. “That’s good, babe, that’s really good. You’re doing real well.”

Steve loosens his grip on his phone and blinks his eyes open, chest feeling a little lighter, after three cycles of that. It’s always meant something, that Danny can do that for him. And it’s always scared him, in this unnameable way, the reason why that might be. 

“Are you good now? You with me?” Danny asks, his voice soft, and Steve huffs out a slightly hoarse laugh and replies with a tired, “Yeah, I’m here, Danny. I’m right here.” 

“Okay, good. Great. I’m glad,” Danny says, the line heavy with a pregnant pause, before he launches into a story about something funny that Charlie did, and their latest case a five-oh, Licoln being a crazy clone of him, and Steve falls asleep to the sound of Danny’s voice, as familiar to him as his own heartbeat. 

It's the most he’s slept since he’s left, which maybe isn’t saying much. 

*

In Arizona, Steve calls the therapist. Her name is Doctor Marney Phillips. She does EMDR, hypnotherapy and a whole host of other techniques with her clients and gets some great breakthroughs, Steve patiently learns from her on the phone. Steve can really use a great fucking breakthrough, a breach to the surface, a lifeline, something, anything, right about now. 

They chat for a little bit, just back and forth, her trying to get a grip on his background damage before she can come up with a treatment plan. 

Phillips says, “In six months, you will be experiencing a completely different way of being inside your own head. Some even do in three months. I don’t want to guarantee it, since nobody really hands those out, but I’ve worked with patients like you, Steve, and the turnarounds that I have witnessed - more times that I can count, might I add - have been nothing short of miraculous.” 

“Wow,” Steve says, trying really hard not to get his hopes up. “That sounds a little bit like a guarantee to me.” 

She chuckles and says, “Maybe a little bit of one, since I have been doing this for over twenty years and I know that I can help you, if you’re ready to start healing. So, what do you say?” 

Steve says yes and then he’s booked for the next month with Skype calls, once a week. 

He texts Danny: 

_So I’m all set up to start spilling my guts out to a stranger once a week_

_Might ask you to call me mid-session with an excuse if things go south_

It takes Danny a couple of hours to respond back with: 

_this is nothing, you’ve got this_

_you’re a stubborn SOB_

_you’ll probably ace whatever it is and start taking on clients yourself once you’re good and ready_

_overachiever_

Steve smiles and shakes his head, hoping that Danny is right. 

*

Danny sends him a video of Lincoln and Charlie at the batting cage. Evidently Lincoln was a bonafide star and was on his way to getting a scholarship in highschool before he decided to serve his country instead. Steve can tell that Charlie is mesmerized by his shy grins and earnest eyes as Lincoln directs him and tells him how to swing, how to work on his stance. 

Steve shouldn’t get jealous, but he does. Lincoln’s laugh is loud and booming and it rattles around inside his head for a bit. The heat of the sun beating down on him the past few hours, at Joe’s ranch, as he’s cleaning up and squaring things away, certainly doesn’t help. 

He calls Danny after he watches the thirty second clip, sweat dripping down his nose and squinting down at his phone, fingers sticky with moisture from having gloves on too long. 

“Are you trying to make me jealous, Danny?” Steve asks, just jumping into it. Maybe missing the teasing tone he was going for by a mile or two. 

Danny huffs out a short laugh and says, “Steve, my main dude, my man, why would I do a silly little thing like that?” 

Steve wipes his face down with his tank top, switching his phone from one hand to the other. “I don’t know, Charlie looks super stoked in that video. I don’t like it. I’m being demoted and it’s no fun,” he pretends to gripe, mouth quirking up in a small grin. 

He can hear Danny call out something in the distance before he’s back and saying, “You, my friend, are impossible to replace. And you know that, and you making me _say_ that is not a cute move. Having me fluff up your ego from a thousand miles away.” 

“Honestly, my ego was bruised, so thank you, Daniel, that helped,” Steve admits with a tired smile as he sits down on the front steps and stretches out his legs. 

It’s quiet for a second before Danny says, “Charlie was getting antsy, since I haven’t really been able to do much with him for the past month, and Lincoln loves kids, since he’s a smart man. They hung out once at your place and boom! Next thing I know, I’ve got more bats and baseball gloves and balls and shit in the house then I know what to do with. It’s been nice, though.” 

The second Steve realizes that he’s frowning, a little bit in dismay, makes him feel like a terrible person. Damn, he really is ten kinds of emotionally stunted. 

So he rushes out, “That’s good, man. I’m glad he’s helping out and fitting in. That’s - that’s really good. Charlie’s a great kid.” 

“Thanks, babe. Look, I’ve gotta go, gotta drop Charlie off at Rachel’s in a bit. Take care, okay?” 

Steve says, “Yeah, yeah, sure. Catch you later. Bye, Danno.”

For a few minutes after that, he sits there and just looks out across Joe’s land, feeling a little bleak. Like he’s missing out on something that he shouldn’t be. 

He tries to figure out if it is out of a sense of responsibility that is deeply entrenched in being there for others more than he is for himself, about whether or not he values himself less than the people around him, and gives up. 

That’s for his therapist to parse out tomorrow. 

*

Doctor Phillips focuses their session on a regression, on hypnotherapy, and Steve’s chest is aching and his mind is reeling by the time nearly two hours are over. 

They follow the root thought and feeling of him feeling like he’s not good enough down so many dark and twisted roads. It doesn’t matter if some of them are actually false and don’t make sense, since on some level, at some point in his life, he bought these beliefs and built a paper house out of them. It became him, his identity. His reality. 

They branch out into:

  * I’m not good enough, that’s why my parents don’t love me. 
  * I’m not good enough, that’s why the people that I love never stay. 
  * I need to be the best in order to get attention. 
  * I need to be in control since so many things in my life are out of my control.
  * When I get hurt, I get attention. 
  * It’s not safe loving other people, because they can hurt me and leave me. 
  * I can’t get hurt again, it might kill me. 
  * I need to leave, before people can leave me. 



Steve thinks about how the memory of him skinning his knee resurfaced - when he jumped from the tree in their backyard that he'd climbed - during the session, and how good he felt when his mom and dad rushed out to check on him. He was only five. But that had had a massive impact. Getting hurt, being reckless, doing dangerous things, meant he got attention. He got their love. The all-pervasive spotlight of their focus solely on him for a fleeting moment. 

Steve thinks about how his self-sabotage and some of his methodologies in the field might be driven by needing to be the best, needing to stand out, even if it means he gets hurt - since that serves its own purpose - makes too much sense right now. 

Steve thinks about all of those times Danny muttered ‘You are insane, you maniac, you animal’ at him and it was all so Steve could, at some unconscious level, in some small way, get Danny’s wide-eyed stare and his laser attention, get scraps of his affection in any way Danny was willing to dish out. A pat on the arm, a hand to the small of his back, a hug. 

His face is wet and he uses his shirt to wipe it down, since he wasn’t expecting to profusely emote so many feelings so soon. 

It’s cathartic and eye-opening and he lets Doctor Phillips continue talking as he tries to get his bearings and compose himself. 

The need to text Danny and talk to him afterwards is strong, but he needs time to really look at all of the things they just took out from Pandora’s box first. 

To actually file them away with recognition and a sense of knowing, instead of burying them back down and slamming the coffin shut. 

That’s how they ended up turning into monsters in the first place.

*

Steve sells Joe's ranch in Montana and donates the proceeds to a VA charity supporting families who've lost their partners and kids in combat. 

Joe would’ve liked that.

*

Doctor Phillips tells him during his third session, after a round of EMDR, “You are progressing so well, Steve. At this point I suggest to my clients to start meditating or picking up yoga, or Qi Gong, since it really compounds the healing and makes the changes more solid and more permanent.” 

Steve blinks at her earnest face on his computer screen. “Seriously? Yoga? _Me?_ I don’t know…”

She lets out a light laugh. “I would try meditation, first. Something focused on breathing and grounding. I can send you some amazing mp3s, if you would like.” 

In for a penny, in for a pound. “Okay, sure. I’ll try meditating. I did a lot of breathing work in the Navy, so that might be easier.” 

After the session, he texts Danny: 

_Shrink is telling me to do yoga, man_

_Hoping I don't have to wear yoga pants_

Danny texts back:

_send pics or it didn't happen_

*

He touches down in LAX and gets picked up by Mary and Joannie. He hugs Mary in a way that he hasn’t allowed himself to before, due to some bullshit macho conditioning, by completely falling into her and letting her support him for a few seconds. He can sense her surprise and then feels her arms harden and tighten around him and they both pull back with bright eyes and crooked grins.

They've never really done vulnerable with each other.

"You look good, Steve," Mary says warmly, and Steve thanks her and picks up Joannie and puts her on his shoulders.

She giggles and calls him silly.

They chat easily as they make their way to the car.

Once home, she dishes out spaghetti and meatballs and Steve eats his fill, like he hasn't for a long while. Hunger hasn't really registered too much during the past few weeks.

Mary helps him settle in for the month that he stays there, and he repays her by completely redoing her backyard and cleaning out the weeds, planting new flower beds and fruit trees and building her a pergola. The backyard transforms into a nice little haven of sorts. 

Mary also agrees to sell the house, back in Oahu, after a long chat the night before Steve has a flight to catch. 

That makes something like relief shake loose inside Steve’s chest. 

It feels like a promise of better things to come. 

*

In the middle of transforming Mary’s backyard and continuing with his therapy appointments, Steve calls Danny up only once within that month, right before he moves on to his next destination. 

"Shit, Danno, I think I kind of ran away, just a little bit, at the end there,” Steve confesses, out of breath, for some reason. 

"Uh huh."

Steve frowns. “What ‘uh huh,’ is that all you're gonna say?” 

“I mean, yes, you're right, please continue.”

“Nice, Danny. Thanks for that.”

There’s Danny’s snort coming through the line and then a long sigh follows it. “Steve, what do you want me to say? I mean, I know all the shit you’ve been through, and maybe it wasn’t one of your finer moments, but Steve, look, you deserve to be cut some slack. You’re human. It was all too much, and it all culminated into this epic shitfest of a thing. I get it. I do.” 

Steve tries to cough discreetly and swallow down the lump that has formed in his throat, to no avail. “Thanks, man. I appreciate it, Danny. I really do.” 

“I know, so… you want to tell me where you’re headed next?” 

Steve looks up into the endless, infinite sky, and says, “Thailand. Going to hang out a Buddhist monastery for a little bit.” 

“You’re gonna get your zen on, is what you’re saying,” and Steve can actually feel how amused Danny is, but that’s fine. 

His therapist hooked him up with the contact info of one of her past clients, another vet and SEAL, who came close to going postal seven years ago but then through therapy and a change of lifestyle, is now a Buddhist monk in Phuket. 

Steve owes it to himself to give this thing that he’s doing, this change that he’s making, a real shot. 

Everything in his life depends on it. 

He needs an unscripted, unsullied future, one that is very different from everything else that he’s experienced in his life thus far. 

He’s got to keep taking out the trash until he can really start the renovations, the gutting, the long overhaul. 

He’s got family to get back to, after all. 

TBC


End file.
